David Kotz
Dartmouth College, NH·Computer Science
Homes are filling with smart devices, from speakers and cameras to thermostats, that compute, talk to each other and send data over the Internet. This creates new security and privacy risks, not only for owners but for everyone who lives in or passes through a home: renters, visitors and domestic workers, in settings from apartments and hotels to senior-living facilities.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
Internet of Things
IoT
smart homes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Develop methods that let smart-home occupants discover, identify and locate Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including non-cooperative ones, and reveal the information flows those devices produce.
- Design interfaces and discovery techniques that shift privacy management from end users to consumer-proxy organizations capable of evaluating the privacy posture of smart devices.
- Study the privacy perceptions and expectations of owners, renters, visitors and domestic workers across residential settings to build a holistic framework for reasoning about smart-home privacy.
- Recommend best-practice principles for security and privacy across the entire lifecycle of residential IoT products and systems.
More about the research
The question is how people in these shared spaces can know what devices are around them, what data they collect, and how privacy can be managed without putting the whole burden on each user.
Why it matters
Residents, renters, guests, domestic workers and older adults in senior-living facilities increasingly share spaces with devices that may record or transmit their data. Tools for detecting hidden devices and tracing their data flows, privacy evaluation by consumer-proxy organizations, and best-practice principles for manufacturers could help make smart homes more trustworthy for everyone who lives in or visits them.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Choffnes
Northeastern University, MA·Computer Science
Design a system that lets network operators state routing goals, or intents, such as better performance or avoiding certain countries, and automatically configures routing announcements to control how traffic enters their network.
Lavanya Elluri
Texas A&M University-Central Texas, TX·Computer Science
Develop a technique to automatically extract rules from U.S. IoT cybersecurity laws, data protection regulations and NIST standards, and store them in semantically rich ontologies built with Semantic Web technologies.
Cori Faklaris
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Computer Science
Gather privacy experts' opinions on how a centralized repository for tracking privacy harms, such as online harassment and cyber abuse, should be designed.
The school
Dartmouth College: 16 labs on PI Pages, $418M a year on research, 104 research doctorates a year.
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